writing words for everyone to see

A rush and a push and the land we stand on is ours!

For the first time in a very long while, I have to say that I’ve been impressed with the Labour Party during this election campaign. I like it that impostors such as Blair and Mandelson have been sidelined, that the parliamentary party has kept on message (ok, I’m not naive enough to know that they’re only after their jobs back and will be back to their usual betrayals in little or no time), that they’ve kept personalities out of it and tried to focus on policies and, yes, that they made a few mistakes. I would much rather have someone who cares, has a bit of passion but maybe no head for retaining figures than some media-trained careerist who may have the gift of the gab but has had all original thought briefed out of them.

Above all, I like it that Jeremy Corbyn has said he will do the following as soon as he is elected as Prime Minister:

Contact Donald Trump and urge him to retract his “unacceptable” remarks about London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Call Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on Friday to kick off Brexit talks, saying his win would give him a mandate to negotiate tariff-free trade.

Set a date for a quick budget to implement key policies, including lifting the public sector pay cap.

Confront Saudi Arabia over its funding for terrorist groups.

Please go out and vote for a fairer Britain. You might not get a better chance.

One last trip back to the 70s and I think we’ve established that there’s only one party trying to take us back there and if they succeed then it really will be to the dark side of that decade, no better portrayed than by Linton Kwesi Johnson. Linton was my introduction to reggae thanks to being on almost constant rotation by the late, great John Peel. ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ is taken from the album ‘Forces of Victory’ (co-produced by the equally magnificent Dennis Bovell) and is a poem in the form of a letter from a man imprisoned in Britain to his mother in Jamaica, setting out the injustice of the racist SUS law that was in widespread use by the police at the time.